Las Vegas, NV

Las Vegas began as a watering stop — the name means "the meadows", for the desert springs — auctioned into existence as a railroad town in 1905, and became the twentieth century's most improbable metropolis: a neon city conjured in the Mojave, where the Rat Pack invented the modern entertainment residency and the Strip made spectacle an industry. Behind the casinos stands a real city of over two million people, and behind the showrooms a serious musical life: the Las Vegas Philharmonic performs at the Smith Center for the Performing Arts, the handsome Art Deco-inspired complex that gave the city a true concert home in 2012.

The archive's documented stage belongs to the university: Artemus W. Ham Concert Hall at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas — for decades the city's principal classical venue, where the great orchestras, soloists and opera tours appeared when they came through the desert, and still the home hall of the university's performing programmes. Beyond the lights lie the region's other superlatives: Red Rock Canyon's sandstone at the city's edge, the Hoover Dam an hour away, and the Neon Museum, where the retired signs of old Vegas glow on in a boneyard of electric archaeology. A city built on luck that has always, in fact, worked very hard.